After our busy Barcelona adventure last month we hardly had any time to breathe in the office in Shanghai - instead we had to stay in the event-execution-mode and prepare the next "work adventures". This month we had 2 major events (plus several smaller) scheduled: The Official Opening of the new W Hotel in Beijing (starring Dita von Teese, Marilyn Manson's burlesque star wifey) and the Launch of Huawei's new P8 phone in London (starring the new P8 - the Grace Phone).

London Launch

I've been working on both our events and were finally put on the London Mobile Launch execution team which meant another overseas trip and another big Huawei event. A 700+ media event with live streaming and huge huge expectations. A bit terrifying and very exciting!

The new Huawei Grace Phone has hundreds of amazing features (refer to the mobile geek blogs), the experts say it's ready to compete with the world's top phones (refer to the mobile experts blogs) and it's about 30-50% cheaper than an iphone! For our event, the most important feature is the fact that Huawei's new phone takes amazing photos in very low light and can be used for light panting. Important because our whole event theme was built up around this feature: with a low light environment and a tag line saying: Awaken your Grace (keyword: seek in the dark, find your inner creativity, with a graceful touch).

When we pitched for the event (yes as they pitch for advertisements in Mad Men) our designers used me for our Key Visual which resulted in the top photo and the one below (taken on a random Tuesday in the office). I'm very impressed by my creative colleagues as well as our graphic designers!

The event was held at The Old Billingsgate at the London Thames waterfront. The famous venue which was once a big fish market and now used for all kinds of happenings and events. Amazing location and amazing view of London Bridge, blue sky and fresh air!

For a big event like this we used 3 days to set up in the venue, where we literally find ourselves inside the building from 8am to midnight or even later. It's crazy days with over 150 people working on setting up, planning, preparing and creating. You just get into this event-mode/survival-mode and when I look back I can't really separate the days from each other.. Just busy working: model casting, furniture selection, F&B ordering, decorations, MC rehearsal with our celebrity Zoe Salmon, lanyards sorting, lots of liaising with all agencies involved such a PR agency, broad casting agency and hundreds of small details related to the venue which was my responsibility. Oh and busy drinking lots of coffees.. Jesus, UK is the "coffee around the corner" country of them all (sorry dear envrionment, when I'm done with events I'll make up for it hopefully at Greenpeace's headquarter, they are amazing!).

The final event was a big success - the actual conference was live streamed on youtube (watch here buuut beware: it's super boring unless you are a mobile gee*** sorry: I mean mobile interested...). The over 700 global media who participated have published hundreds of articles, posts and tweets directly from the event day - it's a live digital age! Amazing to be part of something like this, especially when lots of hard work and long days & nights ends up with a success!